The Mayor vs. the Mogul

Only later did I learn that it is a dire offense to fail to refer outside media overtures to Bloomberg overseers. All Bloomberg employees sign non-disclosure agreements just to get a job—fairly standard procedure for a financial company but an awkward muzzling of free speech for a news organization. Some also sign a “non-disparage clause” and promise never to say anything mean about their corporate master. Bloomberg even asks a few people—those it deems miscreants who have, say, forwarded Bloomberg messages to their personal email accounts—to sign language agreeing to cooperate with Bloomberg requests to access both their home computer and their work computer at their future job. “It creates a climate where there’s a presumption that if they’re trying to figure out who spoke to you, they would not think twice at looking at phone records,” says one former executive, describing a workplace culture that can provoke paranoia among its inhabitants. (Another source told me she’d had a nightmare that I was a Bloomberg spy sent to entrap her.)

Whispering private thoughts and opinions is frowned upon. The company has no offices and prides itself on being “horizontal.” When The Mayor returned to his old headquarters, company chairman Peter Grauer wanted to have a private conversation with him in a conference room. Bloomberg resisted, Grauer insisted. Bloomberg reluctantly went in, Grauer closed the door. Early the next week, Grauer came to work to find that the doors to the conference rooms had been removed.

Not surprisingly, then, few of the more than 30 current and former Bloomberg journalists and executives I spoke to for this article would go on the record. At headquarters in New York and in the newsroom in Washington, scores of cameras watch workers. Business cards don’t carry titles. Everyone is a citizen.

“It’s a fascistoid organization,” says Ben Richardson, formerly a top Bloomberg editor in Asia who quit over the company’s handling of a sensitive story.

Even so, information leaks. Like the anonymous letter to Gawker from someone claiming to be a Bloomberg employee about elevator access being turned off on a certain floor, apparently to discourage people from deserting their terminals. Also mentioned in the letter: the short supply of bathrooms, all the better to prevent lingering in the loo. In this context, Mike Bloomberg’s memo about badges no longer seems odd, a micromanaging detail from Forbes’s No. 14 wealthiest man in the world about ID-carrying protocol that irked female employees who don’t always have pockets on their outfits in which to stash B-units. Same goes for one of the first changes since Bloomberg’s return: the restoration of the time stamp on emails to remind everyone when workers clock in. Get to your desk by 6:58 a.m. or look like a slacker.

The unique media culture at Bloomberg borders on the cultish. The cult leader, at least until recently, was Matt Winkler. His bible? The Bloomberg Way, a hybrid of Strunk & White and the AP style guide written by Winkler that presents a paint-by-numbers approach to journalism, along with plenty of preaching: “As moral force makes journalism a calling for those who embrace it, the Bloomberg Way necessitates a respect for life, peace and harmony, education, family stability, social responsibility, transparency, free trade and free markets.”

The guide served a purpose once, when Bloomberg News first “launched” in the 1990s (The Bloomberg Way informs the writer that the word “launch” is forbidden—“reserved for ships, spacecraft and missiles”). At that time, Bloomberg News was an aggregator in New York. (The Bloomberg Way would like the writer to know that “the U.S. city stands alone,” without reference to its state.) Writers boiled down stories from the one-star editions of the Wall Street Journal into headlines, and “scrambled” (The Bloomberg Way requests that the writer please “leave the scrambling to the eggs”) to get them on the terminal before most traders woke up. The bible had its uses and its hidebound peculiarities, as did its author, a deeply idiosyncratic man with a bully’s rage.

“When Matt’s not screaming, he’s an OK guy,” says one Bloomberg News staffer. “But he gives off the vibe of a hand grenade with the pin pulled.”

Winkler sent weekly notes to the newsroom chastising people for failing to follow the Bloomberg Way. He wanted to be sure everyone marched in lockstep. But he also wanted the validation that comes from winning prizes, particularly the Pulitzer, and could never seem to understand why that trophy remained elusive. “We could hire Usain Bolt and he would never win another race,” says the same staffer. “If you hand a man a 100-pound sack of concrete and tell him to go win the 100-meter dash, it’s not going to work.”

Winkler had finally begun to mellow in recent years—hiring better talent and giving them more rein. But within the black box of the company, a bigger rift emerged between Winkler’s newswire juggernaut and Bloomberg Media, the consumer media division led by Tyrangiel, who was supposed to help bring fresh life to the organization, and Justin Smith, a former diplomat who had made his mark on the business side of journalism by turning the dusty Atlantic into a digital-age moneymaker.

The consumer media division was what would give Mike Bloomberg the cultural schwack he coveted. That was why he had insisted, over the protestations of advisers, on buying Businessweek in 2009. He didn’t care if the magazine was a financial albatross. Businessweek was a suitably dignified conversation piece, one that also helped the overall enterprise in a way that went beyond dollars and cents: Tycoons might not deign to talk to a lowly wire reporter, but they would sit down for an interview with a writer from an influential weekly. Tyrangiel was brought in to remake the magazine. The soft-eyed young editor was a protégé of Norm Pearlstine at Time but had no financial journalism experience, having previously worked at MTV, Vibe and Rolling Stone.

At Businessweek, Tyrangiel set about constructing his own fiefdom. The magazine occupied a floor filled with Brooklyn characters who stood out in contrast to the typical spit-shined employees. Some Bloomberg News staffers referred to the floor as “Williamsburg.” The two operations, so culturally out of sync, often clashed.

Tyrangiel mostly paid lip service to cooperating with Bloomberg News, according to multiple sources. He spoke often about a symbiotic relationship but made little headway in creating one. Slights piled up, sources on the news side recount: emails ignored, Businessweek writers dispatched to cover the same ground as beat reporters and resentment when Tyrangiel chose not to run magazine versions of Bloomberg News’ best efforts, including a series on student loans that won Polk and Loeb awards. (Instead, he hired a freelancer who “did a very superficial job,” according to a former editor at Bloomberg News.)

Resentment went both ways: Few Bloomberg News reporters had the chops to do magazine features, after all. Tyrangiel worked with the ones who did and, for understandable reasons, disdained a lot of Bloomberg News copy. He knew about good writing, had a vision and wanted his own people on the job. As adept as he was at politicking for both his publication and himself, however, Tyrangiel couldn’t broker a peace.

“Josh didn’t have the experience or the interest in what the Bloomberg terminal does every day,” says one former executive. “He’s more likely to go make documentaries.”